Posts Tagged guestpost

Guestpost: Kristina Busse on academics, fans, and the fuzzy line between

Posted by admin in Uncategorized on July 7th, 2009

This week, Kristina Busse discusses what it means to be an aca-fan, addressing the unique subjectivity sometimes required to walk in both worlds.

Online Salons: Fannish Meta Conversations as Ephemeral Traces

Defining Acafans
One of the inherent characteristics of both academics and fans is their tendency to collect and organize—things and, more importantly, information. And yet, as Matt Hills reminds us in his introduction to Fan Cultures (2002), we shouldn’t hastily equate fan and academic cultures or use similar behavior to conclude that they are generated by the same motivations and for the same reasons. Hills argues that representing fans as miniaturised academics is only “a compliment within a value system that particularly or most reliably pertains to intellectuals who have internalized these ideals” (10-11). In other words, being a good academic may be important to other academics but not necessarily to other fans.

One of the greatest challenges for acafans, then, is to represent and analyze fannish communities and their creative products while neither completely othering them nor molding them into familiar academic forms. Fannish interaction must not be subsumed into academic engagement even as it is shaped by and responds to academic discussions: many fans are academically trained in the particular disciplines acafans employ and even more fans read widely around these issues, including acafan works themselves. We thus face a dilemma: how can we respect and encourage the academic aspects of fan writing while still maintain fan meta as a distinct and separate discourse.[1]

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Guestpost: Katie Freund, “Supernatural” and Vidding

Posted by admin in Meta on June 16th, 2009

Please join me in welcoming Katie Freund to FandomResearch! When I was first putting the site together, I knew I would have to ask Katie for her input. She’s one of the first people I met in Toronto. I’ve watched her present on misconceptions about slash in Japan, and she’s helped me write pieces for Frames Per Second. This is another peek at Katie’s expertise, this time on fanvids, intertextuality, and how to read both as a researcher.

“It starts with a story, doesn’t it? And then you get the music to fit the pictures.”

“It’s more like visual fanfic, I think—“

“Yeah, exactly – it’s the story I see in my head when I hear the music… It’s taking it out of your head and putting it out there so other people can see it too.”

“It’s closer to making something like art, isn’t it? It’s drawing a picture for people, a visual text for them to follow.”

There are six of us crowded around a table stuffed with junk food and my single voice recorder in a hotel room in England. I am listening to a group of editors I am interviewing debate the origins of vidding, or fan-made remix videos at VidUKon, a fan convention. It’s a story, I am told, a visual version of fan fiction. It’s an individual’s imagination, their art: vids can be complex treatments of race or gender in popular television, in-depth examinations of certain characterscertain characters, or tributes to beloved shows now cancelled. But above all else, it’s fun.

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A summer’s worth of guestposts

Posted by admin in Site News on June 3rd, 2009

One of the things which always strikes me about the Internet is the generosity of its inhabitants. Perhaps it’s because I’m asking the notoriously gift-oriented fannish crowd for their input, or maybe I just happen to have made a lucky series of acquaintances over the years, but when I started asking people for guestposts, they replied eagerly. The roster is by no means solid, but here’s a sneak peek at what we’ll be discussing this summer:

  • cosplay, photography, and convention behaviour for the fanthropologist
  • vidding (how to read it, how to cite it, why it’s awesome)
  • the cultural assumptions Westerners bring to anime
  • a look at a fan-studies thesis proposal and bibliography (good for students just starting out)

And those are just the people who have emailed me back! I’ve already put the feelers out for some more posts, and will update you as things happen. Meantime, comment here if you can think of other researchers whose work you’d like to hear more about.

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Guestpost: Karen Hellekson on research ethics

Posted by admin in Meta on June 1st, 2009

Since fan studies questionnaires and surveys aren’t released every day, I thought it might be interesting to hear from professionals in the field about their experiences. With any luck, we’ll see more of these posts in the future. For the moment, I’m pleased to introduce a woman who needs no introduction: Karen Hellekson, co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. -Madeline

Fandom research methods

Karen Hellekson

ClinicalTrials.gov provides a model for Fandom Research in terms of attempting to corral study information in one handy place. Fandom Research collects various methods of polling or querying various fan communities, whereas ClinicalTrials.gov collects information about clinical trials that may be accessed by researchers and by regular people who may want to get in on that new cancer drug trial. Compared with creating a good set of valid measures in the ethnography-based fan world, setting up a clinical trial is easy, if only because its protocols are universally well understood, thanks to tried-and-true codes of best practice. Institutional review board approval? Check! Informed consent? Check! Double-blind randomization? Check! Validated questionnaire? Check! Statistical analysis with the correct test for the type of data? Check!

Of course it’s inappropriate to generalize the protocols used in medical clinical trials to fandom research, but many acafans setting up studies need to be aware of the requirements that will ensure the validity—and publishability—of their work. Before initiating a study that involves human subjects, acafans affiliated with a university may need to wend their way through their institution’s byzantine institutional review board (IRB) paperwork, where they will be faced with ridiculous requirements that have nothing to do with their discipline. IRBs generally work with proposed studies that are biomedical or behavioral, not in the field of social science, and the one-size-fits-all paperwork reflects that.

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